2023-11-11 16:31:00
the essential The painter Sylvie Dupouy is well known in Lavelanet and Ariège, where she settled around fifteen years ago. But who, among her students and Ariège art lovers, knows that she lent her brush to an art forger for 30 years? Encounter.
Sylvie Dupouy’s workshop in Lavelanet, in Ariège, might be that of a 19th century painter: a long, shady room with a creaky floor, cluttered with a large wooden table covered with spots of dry paint and, scattered in the room, easels on which his students’ works in progress await. Students of whom very few know the unusual story of their teacher who, for 30 years, was the little hand of an art forger.
Nothing predisposed the artist to meet such a fate, even if an anecdote dating back to his adolescence might have made him guess. “I was destined for the hotel industry,” she remembers. “But I liked drawing and painting, and I liked music too. One day, when I was 13, I recognized Berlioz on a note from 10 francs. I liked this portrait of Delacroix, so I started by reproducing it, then I made the bank note around it.”
Meeting with a forger
The copy is not very good, but the virus took hold. While embarking on the profession she chose, multiplying missions for 15 years in different hotel establishments and traveling all over the world, Sylvie Dupouy draws, paints, trains her hands. Until that day in 1988 when, during one of these missions, a man discovered by chance the portrait she had painted of a colleague’s son, and spoke regarding it to a painter he knew.
If there are famous painters, Jean-Jacques Montfort, real name Bastogy, is not one of them. A few years earlier, this former student of the Beaux-Arts in Paris, however, became known to the courts for having committed numerous forgeries in the 1970s, copying Renoir, Warhol, Magritte and Chagall, until spending three years in a cell in Fresnes prison. But Sylvie Dupouy doesn’t know anything regarding it yet: “He asked me to have two children in the style of Renoir, he thought they were good and he said to me: ‘I’m hiring you.’ ‘never did it officially, anyway.”
“He found the customers and I did”
Sylvie Dupouy therefore becomes the little hand of the former forger. Everyone has their role: “He found the clients and I did it,” remembers the painter. They were real copies, even if we preferred to call them “in the style of”, because there were small transformations, we added people’s faces inside, that sort of thing. It started with the Impressionists, then Botero, pop art… Botero was always very funny, because I had to make people bigger to bring them into his paintings. Pop art, I made thousands of Marilyns, Elizabeth II, Elizabeth Taylor… Things that didn’t interest me at all: my thing was Renaissance, but doing something old was too dangerous.”
The story of the forger and his painter lasts 30 years, giving rise to thousands of copies where the faces of Sylvie Vartan, hairdresser Jacques Dessange or wealthy Americans appear here and there. “I don’t really know who the sponsors were,” admits Sylvie Dupouy. “I know he had a gallery in Los Angeles, we were supposed to go back there, but it never happened. He also frequented Saint-Germain a lot -des-Prés in his heyday, he had photos of himself with Aznavour, Juliette Greco, but I don’t know any more.”
Paintings on the go
The pace is sustained for the painter. “I had to work quickly, sometimes I got tired of it, but I worked where I wanted, when I wanted. I was a bit of a painting factory, but even if it was the same painting 400 times, I was free. Especially since as soon as I had a little money, I would go traveling once more. I happened to send paintings by DHL from Brazil… Once, a painting was even blocked at the border by customs, who found him suspicious. But I didn’t need to try to sell or make myself known, and I was well paid. He told me he was giving me half the price , but I never checked. In any case, it suited me.”
The boat ended up taking on water in the mid-2010s. “He was much older than me,” relates Sylvie Dupouy. “In the end, he forgot, he got angry over nothing, there were money problems. .. I told him he had to stop, but he always sent me a model, money, and it started once more. He came from time to time to Ariège, I hosted him for eight days, I went to see him two or three times in Paris. Then one day, in 2017, I tried to call him back, no more phone, no more.”
A brutal end
Although she no longer paints “in the style of” and even gave up her brushes for a few years, Sylvie Dupouy remembers these strange years with a certain happiness. “It was an easy life, we don’t want to leave that,” she whispers. “But I probably should have stopped ten years ago, especially since I found myself penniless from day to day. next day. I’ve had a little enough, I think. But if I had an order, I’ll do it.”
Finally, there remains painting, her own: in a fortnight, Sylvie Dupouy will submit with a core of loyal students the statutes of an association intended to take over from Avelan’Art, which disappeared during the Covid epidemic. 19. And his works will still be on display for a few days in a lounge at the restaurant Le Clos Cathala, in Saint-Paul-de-Jarrat, while waiting for other displays. “Sometimes I have regrets,” she sighs. “It’s still strange, painting is very solitary, it’s not an art that we share. It’s a shame.”
1699721247
#painting #factory #free #years #painter #Lavelanet #Ariège #lent #brush #forger
